Has anyone done a tally of which star systems belonged to the Terrans and which to the Vasudans after I published this?
No, not to that degree. That star system writeup has been accepted more or less as fanon. It has proven to be very useful, and campaigns still use it to determine which fleet is based in which system.
Multiple campaigns have referred to it and people even today still find it useful? Well,
damn. Glad I could do something for the Freespace community. It's always nice to feel needed.
Not to mention that it's a nice ego boost for me.
I find it very gratifying that I left something behind that people found useful during my 17 year absence.
Any similar tallies have been smaller, and supplementary in nature. For example, in Scroll, Sesquipedalian decided that Antares, Beta Cygni, Ribos, Betelgeuse, and Ikeya were historically Vasudan systems that were occupied by Terrans during the later stages of the T-V War. These were returned to Vasudan control following BETAC.
That makes sense in-universe in that returning those planets to the Vasudans would go a
long way to cementing the alliance and friendship between the Terrans and Vasudans as well as alienating the Terrans who might have invested in making homes in those systems and felt disgruntled enough to join the NTF. I hereby tip my hat to Sesquipedalian as well as anyone else who used my system tally as a plot point.
In short, you can basically write what you want - in the case above, you could argue that there is a "Antares Federation" for a considerable amount of time which is listed as a Terran state, and both Beta Cygni and Ribos had Arcadias in them.
I think I recall from reading the FS2 Intelligence/History database that after the Great War, the GTA was dissolved and several Terran systems balkanized into a few independent system-states before all joining the GTVA and the Antares Federation was one of these states, right? As for Beta Cygni and Ribos having Arcadias in them, that would also seem to point to the idea that they were Terran-occupied systems as well if they were indeed Vasudan systems originally.
It's not about how many systems you control, but how much population and industry you have in these systems. As such it doesn't matter how many systems you have - in the end the Vasudans probably "won" in a way, their 5 systems survived, while the 24 Terran systems fell apart into blocks. In the end, resources don't matter much, a single system that uses a (still rather tiny) share of its resources (~0.1%) would be able to bury the Sathanas armada in a day.
Yeah, this is actually a plot point in DatDB (and I think at least implied or perhaps mentioned explicitly elsewhere in other campaigns) that having Earth cut off from the rest of Terran space cut off a significant chunk of the Terrans' economic might (ranging from up to 50% of the economic strength of the whole GTA to more than the rest of the GTA combined). That makes sense since Earth is both the most heavily developed and most heavily populated planet in all of Terran space. With Vasuda Prime, I think it's been lampshaded that Vasuda Prime, being a desert world, wouldn't have very many economic resources to support a starfaring society. (At least not without help, which is why there are fan theories that the Ancients might have surreptitiously uplifted the Vasudans. If so, that's a nice Pet The Dog moment for a bunch of genocidal, scary dogmatic aliens like the Ancients.) Then again, Vasuda Prime
was heavily populated by several billion Vasudans, so Vasuda Prime's economic base certainly wasn't nothing....
Yes, the destruction of Vasuda Prime cost billions of Vasudan lives, but it apparently wasn't as economically devastating to the Vasudans as the Terrans losing Earth, especially since it's canon that Khonsu II made economic reforms (as well as political reforms, see the dissolution of the Vasudan Parliament) that allowed the Vasudans to recover faster than the Terrans, which also fueled the resentment of the "Lost Generation." It certainly makes sense that it's not the number of planets you have under your control, it's the resources and population you have on the planets you possess. A few rich planets are (at least) as valuable as a large number of poor planets. When I wrote my post above about how it might have been silly in hindsight to have the Terrans posess four times the number of planets than the Vasudans, I was assuming that parity of resources between the two nations during the T-V War meant having the same number of planets. As Nightmare said, that might not have been the case at all.
